“Secure connection” herein shall refer to a stateful transport and/or session-level data transmission channel that provides privacy and data integrity for data transmission over computer networks. In an illustrative example, a secure connection may be provided by a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection. The SSL protocol employs public key cryptography for peer entity authentication and session key establishment, and further employs a session key for message authentication and data encryption. Establishing an SSL connection may involve a server providing its public key infrastructure (PKI) certificate to a client device requesting the respective connection. The PKI certificate may comprise an identifier of the server, an identifier of the issuing certificate authority, and a public key of the server. The requesting client device may optionally validate the received PKI certificate and then utilize the public key for negotiating an SSL session key that would then be used for encrypting and decrypting the messages flowing between the client device and the server.